First Term Teaching

This is week 14 of term one. The students are taking exams. And I’m busy grading a million papers. Wednesday will be our last day of school before the Christmas/New Year holidays! We’ll have a 2-week break before term two begins on January 6th.

Over the holidays, I’ll be traveling to Lake Malawi with a few other volunteers. So excited!! I’ve never seen the lake. Now that I have completed my 3-month “integration” period in my community, I can take vacation time. Yay!

During that 3-month integration period, I was tasked with assessing the needs of my community in order to determine possible projects I might work on during my time here. Here are the projects we decided on:

(1) Acquiring classroom furniture (desks and chairs - we have very few. See pics further below)

(2) Starting an English club. The kids have asked for an art club so I’ll try to make our activities creative.

(3) Training on resource mobilization and establishing some income generating activities. We’ll see how it goes!

For context, here are a few pictures of my school.

Classrooms. The school has 4 classrooms in total. Each form (grade-level) has its own classroom. Imagine 120 students in here! That is a typical class size.

Library. I will be helping to organize and catalogue the books. Also, we need chairs in the library. The students sit on mats on the floor, currently.

That’s all for now! Next post will be from Lake Malawi 😎

P.S. Cyclone Chido went over Malawi today. I’m fine. It mostly hit the south of the country. Some volunteers near Blantyre were evacuated, and one PCV’s roof blew off. But all are well.